Road to Nowhere
Road to Nowhere is the twelfth level of Crash Bandicoot. Crashie is finally able to put the creatively named New Nativitanian metropolis of Nativopolis behind him! Out in the countryside, Mr. Bandicoot makes the interesting discovery that, like literally everything else he did, Emperor Wuu's highway system is also hilariously terrible, consisting for some reason of nothing more than precarious shoddily constructed rope bridges miles above the ground! (According to some professional social studiers, this might be because of all the cannabis.) If Crizzash the Bizzandicoot hopes to survive this road and successfully make it to nowhere, he will have to sharpen both his eyes and his mind, to learn to make split-second decisions and differentiate between planks in assorted states of disrepair on the fly - some are still sturdy, but then there are the majorly cracked planks, almost non-existent planks, completely non-existent planks, and - for a limited time only - planks in new Mystery Blue flavour!!! Oh, and he'll also have to watch out for Vibrating Wooden Turtles and Professional Wartie Impersonators. Lame. Mr. Bandicoot and the Candidate: Crashiekins Changes Politics Forever and Ever! Forty-eight out of America's fifty states are pretty awesome. Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming are, contiguously, quite literally the bee's knees. I like them. I'm not quite so fond of Hawaii, which I'm fairly certain is exactly like Japan, minus tentacle rape, plus pineapples, the worst fruit in existence. And then there's motherfucking Alaska. Alaska is massive. Over 660,000 square miles, of pure nothingness. Seriously, only 700,000 people live in the biggest state in the Union. It's a gigantic waste of space. And it's so far away, too. It's, like....beyond Canada. And there's so much snow and ice and visible breath there, that it is almost impossible to navigate, ever! So it should come as no surprise that Alaska didn't even receive the very first Crash Bandicoot game, Crash Bandicoot, until the year 2004. Despite its lateness, it would have an amazing affect on the political career of the only good Alaskan: Sarah Louise Palin. When her then-fifteen-year-old son, Track, brought the "new" game home for the first time, her life was forever changed, forever. She especially liked this stage. A lot. Unlike her future political opponent, fan-least-favourite Presidential candidate Barack Obama, she greatly appreciated how Naughty Dog did not try to pretty up the pigs in this stage with lipstick. But, even moreso, she simply appreciated the general concept as a whole. From this point on, her political purpose in the sucktastic state of Alaska was clear: she wanted to build an exact replica to enjoy in her home state. When the inbred, meth-addled citizens of Ketchikan, Alaska wanted to see a bridge built to some gay-ass island, Sarah-Larah-Paling-Palong grinned a big, lipstick-stained, toothy grin: she had found her opportunity to construct a bridgey road to, quite literally, nowhere! In fact, one of the major Mystery Blue flavoured planks of her successful 2006 gubernatorial campaign was the construction of this delightful bridge, which Alaskan voters, also enamoured with the delightful Crash Bandicoot video electronic game, were apparently quite enthusiastic about! Quite literally everybody loved the concept of the Bridgey Road to Nowhere. Not everyone was in love with the concept of the Bridgey Road to Nowhere, however. In the forty-eight mainland states of the United Contiguous States of America, the original Crash Bandicoot was really old news. As a country, we were far more caught up in the delight of Uncle Cortie and Aunt Crashie's Embarrassingly Rushed Adventure, which did not include any bridges, to nowhere or otherwise. When the time came for the United Contiguous American US States Congress to vote on the proposed federal earmarks for the Palinator's pet project, they said "thanks but no thanks" on that Bridgey Road to......wait, what's that? Oh, nevermind. Apparently they did approve the earmarks, for whatever reason. All $442,000,000 of it. Really? I genuinely did not see that one coming. Bravo, Congress! It takes real guts to throw hundreds of millions of dollars at things you hate, and that virtually all Americans think would be stupid. Ah, sweet democracy... Cut to the year 2007, however. Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Enjoys Smoking Lucky Strike Brand Cigarettes finally made its Alaskan début, a mere ten years after its initial release in the good parts of America. Sarah-rah-sis-boom-bah eagerly picked it up, hoping to see more delicious bridge-based hijinx to fuel her bridge-based insanity even further. Instead, however, she was met with the stage Bear Down, which deeply offended her on a personal level, since her other son, Trig, is also a retarded polar bear. The inspirationally consistent and not-at-all hypocritical Sarah "Serra Paylin" Palin immediately turned her back on the series, ditched the Bridgey Road to Nowhere project, and began feebly insisting that she was against it all along. The $442,000,000 Gravina Island Bridge Road to Nowhere, Alaska, 99901 was no more. Alaska, nonetheless, kept the $442,000,000. No, seriously. They fucking did. Goddamn deficit-loving liberals... Trivia *Four popular and famous songs with the name "Road to Nowhere" have been released. The first was performed by British singer Ozzy Osbourne, a heavy metal performer best known for biting the heads off of live Uncle Cortie's Patented Single-File Bat-tle Units during concerts. The second was the work of the American music band The Talking Heads, a rock-and-roll ensemble consisting of members who, true to the group's name, have heads and are able to utilize their larynges to form human speech. The third was by Canadian Inuit Eskimo Lucie Idlout, whom I assume is probably some sort of skanky whore or something. The fourth and final was created by Welsh band Bullet For My Valentine, a band created as part of a professional science experiment to prove the hypothesis that the only thing that could possibly make heavy metal more unbearable and impossible to understand, is the goddamn Welsh. Of these choices, it is almost certainly only a reference to the Ozzy Osbourne and/or Talking Heads songs, seeing as this game was released in 1996, and time travel was not introduced in the series until 1998's Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped. *Near the beginning of this stage is a sign reading "Danger", presumably to warn of the dangerous state of the bridge ahead. It is never explained in-game, however, why the sign is written in ultra-modern English, and not, say, the Nativitanianesian language. However, since Crash Bandicoot himself is illiterate, most fans overlook this extremely rare plot hole, since the sign obviously wasn't meant to be read in the first place. *Incidentally, in Japan, the letters R and L are indistinguishable, and also, hilariously interchangeable. As such, interestingly, in that country, the aforementioned sign counts as not only a warning of "danger" to come, but also, shameless product placement by the Dangel Corporation, a popular French manufacturer of motorcars. Ughhh. Sony Computer Entertainment Japan are such dirty, dirty money whores, who literally only care about dirty, dirty money. Goddamn. I fear I'm going to be physically ill...